Up to 68% of primary school students in LA, with minimal reading comprehension

Laura Poy Solano

Newspaper La Jornada
Friday June 3, 2022, p. 13

In Latin America and the Caribbean, 44 percent of primary school students in third grade and 68.8 percent in sixth grade are at the minimum level of reading proficiency, so It is urgent to take actions to support more intensively learning in reading comprehensionwarns an analysis of the results of the Comparative and Explanatory Regional Study (ERCE) 2019 in reading and writing.

In the presentation of the findings, Macarena Silva and Carmen Sotomayor, researchers at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Education of the University of Chile, recommended promoting intensive work on vocabulary and inference, which are key skills for reading comprehension.

In videoconference they called to teach understand and diversify pedagogical strategies thinking about the multiple elements that are necessary to become an efficient reader in today’s world. They highlighted that both the understanding of what is read and the mastery of writing are fundamental tools to acquire new learning.

They pointed out that beyond generating alarm because of the results obtained by students in the region in reading and writing, we must influence what we can improve so that children and adolescents consider it pleasant to read and write what they think, and that they do not see them as activities boring or representing difficult tasks.

Sotomayor stressed that daily writing is fundamental, because the more students write, even if it is small texts, the better they do it, for which she considered that different genres should be promoted in the classroom for a wide variety of audiences and communicative purposes, in addition to teach writing as a process (drafts) and allow time for writing.

The analysis of the impact of both skills in the training process reveals that to learn in the different disciplines, students need to display a series of skills such as reading fluently, managing complex vocabulary, having a knowledge of the world that allows them to use the context of reading, the ability to infer and look at reading critically, in addition to permanently monitoring the understanding to apply it strategically when needed.